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The event features much more than chili, according to Leslie Caimi, the event coordinator. There are also non-chili food vendors, an art show, live music, kids’ activities and the firefighter challenge competition.

The cookoff opens at 11 a.m., with chili sampling beginning at noon at Evergreen Lake. Awards are presented at 5 p.m., and the event ends just afterward.

Jeffco health officials are setting up a distribution network for the H1N1 flu vaccine, anticipating a large demand for the shots this fall.

"We're planning for a high level of demand for the vaccine," said county health department director Dr. Mark Johnson. "What actually happens, and what the demand actually turns out to be, will depend on how hard the flu hits or the perception of a shortage. We're planning that it's going to be big."

After recently signing a deal for 900 acres previously owned by Clear Creek Open Space, the Forest Service controls 4,000 acres from Mount Evans Wilderness to Noble and Elk meadows, about 4 miles west of Highway 74 on Highway 103. The property begins at the old Squaw Pass gate.

Clear Creek Open Space obtained 1,442 acres in April 2005 with a $5.2 million lottery bridge loan from Great Outdoors Colorado. But all along the idea was to turn the land over to the U.S. Forest Service for ownership and preservation.

For example, Keith and Rebecca Briggs own five houses in the Evergreen area and rent them short-term to vacationers and wedding guests. The business is labor intensive, not very lucrative and also violates existing zoning regulations in Jefferson County. But they are far from alone.

Like the Briggses, dozens of homeowners from Upper Bear Creek to Conifer are part of a growing underground hospitality industry in which individual owners are renting out their houses on a short-term basis for profit.

While recent court rulings have effectively ended open hostilities in the bitter covenant dispute that has raged across Hiwan Country Club for the better part of two years, they've done little to reconcile competing theories of proper neighborhood management, and even less to mend a whole bunch of badly broken fences.

Two sites in El Rancho Town Center will be accepting drop-offs of household hazardous wastes and hard-to-recycle items on Sept. 26.

The two sites, Evergreen Country Day School and Walmart, will accept the drop-offs between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the designated day, said Mereth Meade, a member of the Evergreen Rotary Club’s Project Earth Committee, which is sponsoring the recycling event.

This is Evergreen Rotary’s second annual all-inclusive event that collects hard-to-dispose-of items on the same day.